


Sea Changes

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-15
Updated: 2011-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:33:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Getting out of the cafe; or, the inhumanity of Sapphire and Steel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea Changes

Christmas is coming. There are strings of lights wound around trees, there's tinsel looped around lampposts. The postman staggers up the road with his bag, wheeling his bicycle and then leaning it against the garden wall; it falls over, the edges of the evergreen hedge shredded through the spokes. "Something from Amazon for you, Stanley," he declares as he gets it back up again. "And another one of these."

He takes the postcard and the parcel silently, looking at the grey clouds coming in at the horizon.

"You want to do something about it," the postman insists, struggling with the bike. "What is it, the third time this month? You could tell the police, or someone. Who writes something like that on a postcard?"

 _Something inside you burns_ , in jagged red letters on the card, the address to its right in neat black print. He flips it over. No view of some lake or landmark, just clear white, the perfection of untouched paper. "Thank you," he says. "Thank you, but I'm all right."

"Suit yourself, duck," says the postman, and gets up again. "All I do is deliver. And deliver, and deliver, and deliver." The post-bag hinders him for a moment, a dead weight on the pavement, but he gets it hoisted. With it secured over his shoulder, he sets off. The bike wobbles, but he makes it out of the gate, towards the next house. "See you tomorrow, Stanley."

The rain will be here soon. He turns to go inside. The Amazon parcel is heavy, thick, a little damp. _À la recherche du temps perdu_. He sets it on the desk, and waits.

*

He wakes up after a dream in which he was lying flat on a hard floor, and a woman with blue eyes had just stabbed him with a sharp, small knife. It wasn't a large wound, and it didn't hurt, but it was made in exactly the right place. He feels the slick spreading under his body and wakes up, going barefoot to the window, watching the sun rise in purple and be absorbed by the clouds.

He makes coffee. While it's brewing, he walks around the kitchen, still barefoot, thinking, thinking, throwing off the dream. When he pours out, he misjudges the angle and a little of the coffee hits the carpet, touching his feet. He hisses quietly and says, "Fuck" – and is suddenly, oddly certain that this is the first time he's ever sworn about anything in all his life.

The tap is running and he's standing there, looking at the ground, when a voice calls from the window.

"Stanley!" A pause, and it continues, "Oh, good, you're up. You owe rent, you know."

"Do I?" he asks, and the landlady comes to the other side of the glass. He unlatches the window. "There was a standing order...."

"S'buggered up somehow, I was just going over accounts." The landlady's name is Gita. She goes around to the door and he opens it. Without really thinking about it, he turns back to the coffee pot and puts more water in it, for her.

"Don't look worried, it's not you, the bank's done something stupid." She waves a distracted hand. "Look, Stanley, I really have to pop down the road and get this bloody thing sorted. You couldn't run up for a moment and watch Amita, could you? She's in her crib, sleeping like the dead, I'd only be five minutes. Just keep an eye on her so I don't get her taken away by social services or whatever, eh?"

"I will," he says. "Give me some time."

"Thank you so much," she says, clapping him on the shoulder. "Just come on up whenever you're ready, all right?"

She goes out. He walks around the kitchen, the last of the liquid drying between his feet and the floor. He turns off the kettle, puts the mugs in the sink.

"Time," he says again, quietly, into the silence. He's had a dream before of a child, a knife, and barbed wire in his mouth.

He picks up a kitchen knife and it feels right in his hand. He lets it clatter to the surface, leaves it. He goes upstairs.

*

"That's an interesting ring you're wearing," says the doctor. Her name is Dr. McConnell. She's about thirty, with red hair and flat vowels in her accent. "Not one of those copper anti-arthritic magnetic ones, is it? I have such trouble, telling little old ladies not to waste their money on those dreadful useless things."

"No. It..." - he pauses – "means something." It's metal, on the fourth finger of his left hand. It clinks dully against the edge of the little table between them. Between them, the window gives a grey view of the medical centre grounds: a sad square of grass, a set of swings with children playing, damp benches with old men getting rained upon. Beyond, cars are turning their headlights on in the rising dark.

"Ah." She glances at the ring, and then at him. "Do you have any longer-term prescriptions, Mr. Smith? I'm afraid your notes haven't followed you here yet – give it time, and..."

"No more prescriptions," he says.

She gazes at him. "I bring it up, because frankly, Mr. Smith, I'd say you're depressed."

"No more prescriptions," he says again, and she sighs.

She writes something out for him and tells him to go back to the reception. He walks down through the passageway and down the stairs, to the waiting room below. The walls are painted an institutional green; the beams are solid. A woman standing by the doorway is crying, messily but quietly, as though she's been crying a long time. Small whispers are breaking out like fires along the rows of plastic chairs. It's bright here with fairy lights and flimsy tinsel, but there's something heavy in the air of the room.

He crosses over to the window and looks out, along the wall. The gleaming excrescence of the practice, all silver and chrome, juts out from the original heavy sandstone building. In the fifteenth century there was a leper hospital on this site.

"Her baby," says a practice nurse as he reaches the door, looking first at him and then at the woman with the empty pram. "She's gone, missing – somebody must have – did you see, did you see anything?"

He shakes his head and leaves. There's nothing he can do. When he gets home there's another card on the mat. _Read the book._

*

He's sleeping a lot these days, dreaming of stars. It's early afternoon, cold, when he wakes up and heads out, drawing a scarf around his neck against the chill of the wind coming in from the water.

He vaults over the low sea wall in a sudden burst of movement. His feet thud onto the wet sand and someone says, "This is your lucky day, mate."

He turns around and an old man, wiry and brown, is looking at him curiously. He's holding the reins of two donkeys with large, sad eyes and weatherbeaten leather harnesses. "The tide only comes in thirty days a year. All this" – he points at the wintry seafront, the stalls once selling pink rock and plastic buckets, the closed amusement arcades – "and it only comes in for thirty days. And here it is for you."

The tide isn't all the way in yet, but it's in sight, covering over stale sand and bladderwrack inch by chilly inch. "I see it."

There are no other people anywhere near. Cars curve along the line of the coast road, heading south; a man walks his dog in the far distance. The wind is lifting, pulling debris in whirls across the sweep of foreshore.

"Here," the old man says suddenly, "you weren't planning on topping yourself, were you?"

He considers, his indrawn breath rich and harsh with salt. "No."

"Well, then." The old man stops walking. "I don't get much company, you may as well stay while I get the nosebags on. Name's Joe, by the way."

He nods, opens his mouth to reply, then stands still. The donkeys splutter and whinny, blowing warm steam while Joe pets them, muttering rough endearments. "What're you out here for, anyway?"

He breathes in, he breathes out. The salt makes it easier to think. "I'm waiting for someone."

"A woman?"

He nods. "Yes."

The answer seems to satisfy the old man. He goes back to fussing with the donkeys, idly pulling tangles out of the nearest one's mane. There are calluses on his hands, and the edge of a tattoo visible from under a sleeve. "Funny," he says, reflectively, "the sea comes back for her own, in the end."

"Yes." He's still standing motionless, watching the patterns of wind and water. Neither of them says a word for a moment. Above the low roar of the waves are the smaller sounds, the donkeys chewing, the clinking of their harnesses.

"Do you smoke?" Joe asks after a while.

Honestly, he says, "I don't know."

"That means you do, mate."

Hesitantly, he takes the offered cigarette. The warmth of it is pleasant in his hand, in his mouth. "Perhaps you're right."

"Often am," Joe says, and slaps the nearest donkey's neck, lovingly. "Get on with your oats, sweetness. Don't suppose you want a donkey ride, do you?"

He looks at the animal, frayed and threadbare as its tack. "I don't believe I have ever ridden on a donkey."

"Who has, any more? 2011, ye gods. Who rides a donkey at the seaside, any more? And in winter, too!" He waves a hand. "Well, there's not a soul, is there. It's as though time's stopped."

He has a sudden sense memory, or premonition: hot sun on the back of his neck; fairground music, minor-key distorted; distant rollercoaster screams. He states, "Time has not stopped."

"I suppose not. Tide's coming in, we'd best hop to it if we don't want our feet wet."

He nods, and goes to scale the wall again, and then pauses. "Thank you for the cigarette," he says, the words practiced, unfamiliar, and climbs up. When he turns around Joe and the two donkeys have set off across the beach. Joe waves cheerfully, then heads on.

The postcard in his pocket reads: _to those in peril on the sea._

*

He reads the book; it's only the start of the story, but he finds a date handwritten on the inside back cover. On the twenty-fourth of December, he puts it down on the desk and goes out into the chill of the evening. It's past five o'clock and the last-minute shoppers have retreated from the ferocity of the wind. The gusts pick up sweet wrappers, leaflets promising "Big Fun Big Win" at the fun house on the pier. The scraps linger on the edge for a moment, then drop on the sands.

The sea is barely edging forward, the stars reflecting in the surface, still, far below. He looks up as a woman in a blue dress sits beside him, near enough for him to feel her body heat. They sit there a moment before either of them thinks to speak. She's wearing a ring with a stone in it. "Who are you?" she asks.

He opens his mouth to say, _Stanley Smith_. "I don't know."

For a moment he thinks she's going to kiss him, and then she does. They hold on -to each other's hands during the change, and it's not like waking from a dream, or into another life. They hold hands and they are who and where they have always been, on this bench at the edge of the starry expanse, the black water.

"Sapphire," he says, and it's a naming.

"Steel" – and it's a binding, too.

They let go their hands, their breath, close together, close enough to be each other's warmth.

"What did you do?" she asks.

 _I walked by the sea; I watched over the children._ "I waited for you. What did you do?"

She smiles. "I looked for you." The way she says it, with emotion, without inflection, reminds him of countless other places, other times.

"Did it involve the sending of postcards?"

"I don't recall. It happened to another person."

He understands that. _To another person; in another place._

After a while, she asks, "Why here?"

He thinks about it. "The sea, the edge of the land," he says at last. "The sand erodes, children become old men, the tide takes it all away."

She nods. "Everything happens in the right order."

The wind picks up, drops. Gulls are calling in the distance. He's remembering. _What happened, after?_ "What happened, after?"

 _I heard you the first time._

He looks at her. _Sapphire-_

 _I wrapped your body. I took out the knife._

There's a long, long silence. Above them, the stars are moving, imperceptibly for humans, making slow procession around the North Star. Sapphire says, "You were right. The Transient Beings would never allow us to leave intact. We could leave as humans, we could leave through mortality. We would never leave that place as we were."

"What are we?" Steel asks, matching speech with speech.

 _We are Sapphire and Steel._

He smiles at that. _All right. Now what?_

 _We wait to be called._

He kisses her; she rests her head on his shoulder. They watch the sea come in.


End file.
